There are many regions of the United States that are arid or semi-arid to the extent they require regular irrigation to maintain the health and vitality of the landscaping and grass. In some cases these arid and semi-arid regions routinely experience a shortage of water, and as a result water drawn from a municipal water system is a precious and expensive commodity to be conserved as much as possible. In extreme cases of potable water shortage, the amount of water consumed on a piece of property can be priced such that the lowest prices are charged for the minimum amount of water usage and then prices increase on a graduated scale, depending upon the excess usage of water, to discourage excessive consumption of water. Accordingly, it is in the property owner's best interests to use the minimum amount of water that is necessary to sustain the grass and landscaping features of any particular property.
Most residential houses, in arid and semi arid regions, have an underground sprinkler system provided with a timer control, usually located in an enclosed garage. These residential timer controls are not encased within a lockable box so that they are easily accessible to the homeowner for purposes of adjusting the timing and duration of the irrigation cycles, as the seasons pass and the requirements for irrigation increase and/or decrease. The typical timer is provides for a number of different circuits, normally nine or less, and give the operator flexibility as to the number of times a circuit automatically turns on each day, the length of run time for each cycle, and the even the days of the week that the irrigation system actually is operable to control the circuits, for example every day or every other day.
In commercial settings such as a multiple apartment buildings or office complexes, these timers are contained within lockable sprinkler timer boxes which are mounted to the exterior of the building someplace convenient for the landscapers to set them up and control the irrigation. If there are multiple buildings the sprinkler boxes are generally not located in one central location as that would require low voltage wiring runs to the various sprinkler circuit manifolds scattered around the property that may extend for hundreds, if not several hundred, feet in length. Rather than incurring that cost and the unreliability of such a watering and timer wiring system, each building may have its own sprinkler timer box which controls the sprinklers in that particular localized area. These sprinkler timer boxes are typically formed of some sort of plastic, typically polypropylene and/or polyethylene, which has some resilient characteristics and is somewhat pliable so as to withstand impacts from something as simple as a child throwing a baseball or snowball without shattering the box and exposing the timers, electrical circuits and wiring that are contained within the box.
Simple keyed cam locks are provided to secure the boxes. The typical manufacturing standard is that all boxes of a certain model that are produced by the same particular manufacture are keyed using the same key code so as to reduce the number of keys that a landscaper has to carry around when checking the timers on the circuits in the multiple boxes. The initial settings for the irrigation system when installed by the landscaper are carefully selected to provide a sufficient, but never excessive, amount of irrigation water to each irrigation circuit in the system. For example, there may be a circuit which is comprised of shrub bubblers located within a hedge row or some ornamental shrub feature of landscape, and another circuit for grassy or expansive areas that are open and yet a third for some other application such as that in a confined space where the sprinklers might, for example, be located on a small grassy area adjacent to a vehicle parking area and may require specialized sprinklers throwing rectangular or oblong patterns of water.
Sprinkler control circuits also have to be adjusted during changing seasons, for example if the spring is rainy, wet, and cool, less irrigation water will be required and the operating times for each sprinkler and perhaps the frequency of operation can be reduced, and during the heat of hot summer dry days can be increased to compensate for the increased evaporative conditions and the resulted amount of water required for irrigation.
The problem is that tenants often pry open the boxes and readjust the sprinkler timers either up or down to suit that particular tenant's needs or his perceived need for irrigation. For example, a tenant can pry the box open and turn off a sprinkler circuit where overspray on a windy day will soak down his vehicle with irrigation water and leaves dried residue on the vehicle paint as it evaporates. In other cases, it can be just the opposite where a tenant perceives a need to increase the irrigation watering cycle thinking that landscaping shrubbery and grass may need more water than is actually being provided.
The landscapers do not necessarily always check the boxes each and every time they perform maintenance on the lawn and landscaping. It may be two or three weeks before a landscaper checks the circuits and by then it may be too late in that the landscaping is fully stressed by a lack of water, or at the opposite end, the landscaper may not pick up on the increase in the watering cycles or duration of watering until the real estate owners receive an unpleasantly and unexpectedly high water bill from the municipal water system.
Referring to prior art FIG. 1, a typical prior art sprinkler timer box is disclosed. For simplicity sake, the internal timer and electrical components are not shown in the drawings. As can be seen, there is a base portion of the box which is mounted using either screws or bolts to a mounting surface, typically the side of an apartment house or commercial building. The cover is typically hinged either on the side or the bottom and is shown in the prior art drawing FIG. 1, the hinge is on the bottom and it interconnects the base portion of the box and its cover. At some appropriate location adjacent to the open end of the cover a cam lock assembly is installed which is keyed to be locked in place. This is a simple locking mechanism which simply rotates a locking cam to a position where it engages the locking tab molded integral with the box base. The problem with this type of a locking mechanism is that it can be easily defeated by a screwdriver wielding tenant intent on readjusting the irrigation control system. A tenant would simply insert the screwdriver tip between the lip of the cover, as shown in prior art FIG. 2, and then using the lip of the cover as a fulcrum, pry out, and temporarily deform the base sidewall until the locking tab disengages from the locking cam at which point the cover will simply pop open. There is enough pliability and elasticity in the resilient material that the box is formed of to enable a tenant to do this quickly and easily. Once the box is open, a tenant then readjusts the sprinkler timers however the tenant sees fit. And it may be weeks before the landscapers discover that the tenant has done this. This appears to be a common problem experienced by most landscaping maintenance companies.
Accordingly, what is needed is a way to secure these pre-existing irrigation timer boxes so as to prohibit tenants from intentionally breaking into them and readjusting the sprinkler system.